Open Call for Innovative Defense-Related Dual-Purpose Technologies/Solutions with a Clear Air Force Stakeholder Need

The goal of this proposal is to integrate and adapt autonomous system technologies currently being used in the automotive technology space to validate the robustness of Air Force autonomous systems. Our initial transition focus is to serve agile Air Force autonomy development. Future offset strategies depend on autonomy to maintain overmatch. Developers demonstrate autonomy’s performance in nominal conditions, but there is no “nominal” in theater. Airmen have a history of resourcefully tackling unexpected situations and achieve their mission. Will our algorithms be up to the task? Edge Case Research is building large-scale autonomy validation platforms such as Hologram for the automotive industry that answer these kinds of questions. In the automotive market, we see that groups with expertise in agile process and machine learning groups are often siloed from those with systems and safety engineering background. The result is delay and increased cost in developing safe autonomy. Edge Case wants to fix this problem for the Air Force. On this SBIR, we will adapt our Hologram COTS product for Air Force use cases, and will integrate Hologram into a platform for validating assurance cases for mission-critical applications such as autonomous UAVs. Hologram automatically finds defects in machine learning-based perception systems.